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Moritat is a group of three friends who met in the vibrant Chicago music scene of the new millennium. Comprised of keyboardist Venus Laurel, guitarist/bassist Konstantin Jace and drummer Corey McCafferty, the trio first collaborated on Laurel's solo piano project. Soon thereafter, in 2008, they moved into a two-flat with the idea of starting a band with a nod to experimental songwriting. After a busy and productive first year of building out their home studio and writing material, the house was burglarized. All of their gear, laptops, and song ideas were lost and the music stopped.

For a year the group took time to reassemble their instruments, space, and sound, beginning the work that would lead to their debut LP in 2012, Clill Blanzin. Recorded at the legendary Engine Studios with Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine) at the helm, Clill Blanzin is a self-described “greatest hits album from the future”. Anchored by a host of avant pop tendencies, angular art rock rhythms and striking post-rock textures, the release found the band shifting styles within the blink of an eye, pushing their already elastic aesthetic to its breaking point. Not content to simply work their influences through the typical filters, Moritat relied on their own sense of adventurism to guide them through the song writing process.

Then, in 2013 a CD-R was discovered under the carpet of their home studio. It was marked in bright neon paint marker: HIGH PLUS TIGHT. Remarkably, it was a set of beat oriented tracks developed by Laurel on her laptop prior to the burglary and thought to be lost. Energized by the reappearance of these nearly forgotten songs, the band immediately set upon finishing them. They spent all their free time either holed up in the studio or taking inspiration from city wanderings, sometimes even practicing their vocal chemistry in the quiet after-hours of the Chicago Loop.

Produced entirely at home by the band, with McCafferty engineering and mixing the sessions, High Plus Tight is the sound of a band with a renewed purpose and creative drive. Developing a unique musical aesthetic that rings with the dense sounds of indie rock and experimental pop, Moritat has finished a set of songs that's been in the making since 2008. It may have come later than the band would have liked, and through a prism of loss and rebirth, but the beat of High Plus Tight is finally ready to be heard.